Many of us have wondered why Europeans seem to have welcomed so many migrants from the Middle East. At first, they welcomed the migrants with flowers and food and housing, and even song. Whether this was simply a case of accepting at face value the term “refugees” or “migrants,” and believing that they must help the unfortunate, or just being terminally uninformed, I have no idea. In the wake of the Manchester attack, the thoughts of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble give a glimpse of the thought processes. The growing number of Muslims in Germany, he said, represent a learning opportunity rather than a threat.

“It is fanaticism, not only in Islam, that leads to terrible crimes,” he said, speaking on German public radio station Deutschlandfunk Wednesday evening, when asked about the Islamist attack in which 22 mostly young people, including an eight-year-old girl, lost their lives. …

“The world’s great religions all preach the message that one must look upon others as their sisters and brothers, and that one must live with the other because man cannot live alone,” Schäuble told presenter Christiane Florin.

“‘Islam is part of Germany’ is a sober, factual statement,” the minister remarked, commenting on sentiments voiced by Chancellor Angela Merkel on more than one occasion – which are not shared by the majority of Germans.

“Anyone who denies this denies reality and is therefore not suited to being a politician, because politics begins with the confrontation of reality,” he added.

The number of refugees in Germany who are capable of committing terrorist acts has quadrupled since 2011, the German Federal Criminal Police Office has said.

Security concerns have heightened in Germany after close to a million refugees arrived in 2015 from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa. Fears worsened when more than 1,200 women were reportedly assaulted in various German cities on New Year’s Eve in 2015.

Officials say there are 657 refugees capable of committing terror attacks and 388 potential accomplices in such attacks.

The Manchester attack has awakened British officialdom to the threat to their people, and armed military people are guarding the trains in Britain. Hungary has put up a wall, and is accepting no migrants. Other nations are having all sorts of trouble with the migrants who have arrived in their countries. France has ‘no go’ neighborhoods where even the police will not venture, and numbers of attacks.

The new French President, Emmanuel Macron, wants Islam to have more room in France. Like many European leaders Macron seems to be convinced that the remedy for the demographic deficit and the aging of ethnic European populations is more immigration. Besides, they seem to be more worried about climate change. Macron claimed to be a ‘centrist’, but the outgoing Socialist President François Hollande has spoken of him as a “continuity”, not an alternative. His entire program is socialist. Lots of additional public expenditures, and climate change is defined as the “key issue for the future of the world.”

Our own Secretary of Homeland Security, General John Kelly, remarked today that “if we knew what he knows about terror threats in this country, we’d never leave the house.”

He was interviewed on Fox and Friends on Friday and said that the terror threat is “worse than we realize.” He pointed out four major terror attacks in the last week, by “more or less the same groups,” in Manchester, England, in Egypt where 28 Coptic Christians were slaughtered, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, and in Indonesia.

“It’s everywhere. It’s constant. It’s nonstop. The good news for us in America is we have amazing people protecting us every day. But it can happen here almost any time,” Kelly said.

Here’s Andy McCarthy:

Here is the blunt, inescapable fact: The United States is in a defensive war against what is imprecisely called “radical Islam.” The war proceeds on two tracks: the kinetic militancy of jihadists, and the cultural challenge of anti-Western, anti-constitutional Islamic law and mores. The ideology that catalyzes both tracks is sharia supremacism — the implementation and spreading of sharia, classical Islam’s societal structure and legal code, is the rationale for all jihadist terror and of all the Islamist cultural aggression that slipstreams behind it.

The dividing line is sharia supremacism. On one side of it we find patriotic, pro-American Muslims who are spiritually devout but reject the imposition of sharia on civil and political life; on the other, the Islamists — the sharia supremacists. The challenge posed by the latter is not merely that some percentage of them are jihadists; it is that as a population — or as enclaves that take hold in the West — they are assimilation-resistant, and their ideological havens will breed the jihadists of the future while stifling the Constitution in the here and now.

That is what we have to vet for. That is what the majority of the American people want: Muslims who embrace our way of life invited in, Muslims who threaten our way of life kept out. You can’t get there without subjecting Muslim aliens to more-extensive inspection.

What can we do? Try to be informed, and I guess, be ready with the candles and flowers.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expanding a program that allows foreign students with degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) to extend their stay in the U.S to work after graduation. Since, unlike native Americans, they are still defined as “students” they are not required to pay social security and Medicare taxes. The bonus given to employers for hiring a foreign STEM graduate will increase from $10,000 to $12,000. So an employer is more apt to hire a foreign graduate to work in their field of study, than to hire a new American STEM graduate.

Our nation will benefit from keeping international students here, educated in U.S. colleges and universities here while they receive additional training, rather than sending them out of the country,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldaña said in a statement Friday. “At the same time, U.S. employers will benefit from the increased ability to rely on the skills acquired by U.S. educated-STEM students, as well as their knowledge of markets in their home countries.”

And proud parents of new STEM graduates might wonder why their kids can’t seem to find a job? It was recently reported that Disney tech employees were let go, but required to train the foreign workers hired to replace them. There have been many cases of our high-tech companies hiring cheaper foreign workers, who because they are only here because of the H1-B program, are not likely to complain or be difficult for fear of losing their visas.

I don’t understand how this makes sense. Some say that Obama is attempting to change the electoral college which is based on population at the time of the election, so more immigrants can skew the vote. He is clearly trying to get more immigrants, legal and illegal, through a simplified citizenship process so they can vote in the 2016 election. Apparently we are to be troubled by this petty tyrant for years and years to come.

In almost six months, there have been two unsuccessful attacks on American soil, the Detroit Christmas Day bombing, and last Saturday’s Times Square attempted bombing. Warnings were ignored, facts were not put together.

Our first line of defense is the Visa Security Program which puts Homeland Security officers at U.S. Consulate offices to perform background checks on visa applicants. To date, the Administration has only deployed officers at 14 high risk countries, out of 57 likely candidates.

Obama is planning to freeze the program’s budget for fiscal 2011. It’s hard to avoid the idea that the administration does not take terrorism very seriously. There is a constant attempt to over-reassure, and play down the attacks that have taken place. It would seem that this is part of Obama’s efforts to reach out to Muslim countries in hopes of — successful talks someday?

Senators Lieberman and Collins are considering suing the administration to get information about why the signs of Major Nidal Hassan’s increasing radicalism were ignored or sloughed off. Shahzad was dismissed as an amateur, dismissed as a one-off attempt by a lone wolf angry about health care, and Abdulmutallab was given a visa in spite of warnings from his own father that he was dangerous. And at that, because his attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit failed, it was again sloughed off as unimportant. The terrorist attempt in Times Square is referred to on the White House website as “The Times Square Incident.” Another ‘Man-Caused” Event?

We just have different priorities. Will they change before there is another successful attack?

On March 27, Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was murdered by an unknown gunman who entered and exited the U.S. illegally in an area where border agents are widely prohibited from using motorized vehicles, constructing roads or installing surveillance structures.

Four Republican congressmen introduced legislation on Wednesday that bans the Interior Department from using environmental regulation to forestall Border Patrol access. The congressmen say that their bill will address environmental degradation of federal lands and help to close national security gaps along the border.

Securing the borders against illegal entry is a matter of national security, and the illegals who cross the border do considerable damage to the environment as has been shown on videos of the area. Internal documents show that the Interior Department and the U.S. Forest Service have actively prevented Border Patrol agents from securing U.S. borders by requiring Department of Homeland Security officials to complete lengthy environmental analyses, and even blocking agents from entering some areas.

And DHS has paid the Department of the Interior more than $9 million since 2007 to “mitigate the environmental damage” of protecting the border. That would be the areas where the Border Patrol is restricted from using motorized vehicles, building roads or installing surveillance. A 2009 memorandum of agreement agrees that DHS will pay DOI an additional $50 million for mitigation funds, but DOI officials have not revealed how those funds will be used.

This is typical of Big Government. Congress has passed their regulatory tasks off to governmental agencies, and the right hand seldom knows what the left hand is doing. Not that Congress does a good job of regulation, but at least there is some oversight, and they are responsible ultimately to the voters. But government money is easily shuffled around. If we could track the useless and unnecessary expenditures, hold a lot of official feet to the fire, perhaps tax day wouldn’t be so painful.

Authorities are searching for 270 Somalis believed to have illegally entered the United States with help from a Virginia man who admitted contacts with an Islamic terrorist group.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Thomas Eyre testified in a hearing in Alexandria’s federal court, that authorities are “concerned” about Anthony Joseph Tracy’s connections to the group. According to an affidavit filed with the court, Mr. Tracy told authorities that he came in contact with the Somali terrorist organization Al-Shabaab, which announced an alliance with al Qaeda earlier this year. Tracy has been held without bail.

Tracy’s emails, combined with information on Facebook, show that the Somalis have spread across the country and are living in New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota and Arizona. They are believed to have made a complex trip from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow to Cuba to South America to Mexico and then across the U.S. Mexico border.

Well, they got the guy who provided fraudulent information for the travel visas, but the 270 Somalis are missing. You know that fence on the U.S./ Mexico border that they were going to build? I wonder how many jobs that would provide?

According to this website, the State Department has admitted 83,991 Somali Muslims in the last 25 years, and had to suspend family reunification because DNA testing revealed widespread immigration fraud.

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The American Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, says that her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after Thursday’s dreadful massacre by U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is enlightening to see just what the Obama administration means by “homeland security.” Can’t offend anyone. Don’t want any hurt feelings.